Marlins Front Office Won’t Speak to Media
By Aaron Somers
As if the Miami Marlins front office wasn’t hated enough by fans of the team, they somehow continue to make the situation worse. The latest debacle in a long series of troublesome moves came to light over the weekend, as the Miami Herald’s Barry Jackson (via Drew Silva of Hardball Talk) mentions towards the end of his latest news and notes column:
"Besides forbidding President David Samson from doing his radio show, Marlins owner Jeffrey Loria also told Samson that he can no longer do interviews. That’s short-sighted, because Samson made himself more accountable and accessible than many team presidents, even amid unpopular decisions made solely by Loria. Loria, by the way, has refused to speak to the media since mid-November."
Miami Marlins president David Samson (left) and owner Jeffrey H. Loria (right). (Image Credit: Robert Mayer-USA TODAY Sports)
Loria has already become a villain in the eyes of most fans of the Marlins and many within the Miami market, to the point where there is a growing collection of fans (baseball fans, not just Marlins fans) that believe he is proving to be more detrimental than beneficial to the game. He’s decimated the team’s roster time and time again, selling off the team’s top players for prospects rather than retaining the talent to keep the team competitive with consistency. Their latest purge was a significant one – as the team shipped Jose Reyes and Mark Buehrle to the Toronto Blue Jays less than a year after signing both on the free agent market and giving the pair a “verbal promise” that they wouldn’t be dealt before the end of their respective contracts. The November move is far from the first firesale of the Loria regime.
Perhaps what was most concerning about the situation, Loria had just poached the Miami taxpayers for hundreds of millions of dollars in funding for the team’s new ballpark which opened this past season.
Now, barely a year later, he’s instructed Samson to cease talking to the media and being available to the fans. Samson has long been a regular guest on Dan Le Batard’s radio show in Miami, answering fans’ questions and discussing club matters. His public persona has been a lone bright spot from the team’s front office, mostly because his transparency gave the fans a rare person they could still respect within the organization with all that the team was (or wasn’t) doing. Now, with a forced silence, Samson is likely to get lumped in with Loria as one of the “bad guys” in Miami, whether justified or not.